Saturday, May 24, 2008

Jihad putsch in Lebanon

Paris

Nidra Poller

The 2006 Hizbullah war against Israel was packaged in France as a (Lebanese) humanitarian crisis. Public opinion was worked to a frenzy by images of suffering civilians while on the diplomatic level the French foreign minister gradually imposed terms and conditions dictated by Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and trickled down through Fouad Siniora to his French ally. UN Resolution 1701 “saved” Lebanon from Israel and delivered the country into the hands of Hizbullah. UNIFIL troops looked the other way as Hizbullah rearmed. The besieged Siniora government was reduced to impotence. French opinion makers followed with lazy distraction as the Iranian-backed movement pursued its jihad style takeover. By contrast, the current jihad putsch with its massive attack against civil liberties has been underplayed. And the fate of French UNIFIL troops has not even been mentioned. Citizens of the free world should be transfixed in horror at the sight of jihad in action. Instead they are fed outdated analyses of the specter of civil war.

A Lebanese woman in hijab beat her breast and screamed in fury: “Hizbullah promised they’d never turn their weapons on us… they’d only use them on the Jews.” The translator changed Yahoud to Israelis. As if that could protect them from a similar fate in a not too distant future. Prematurely aged, her teeth botched with dark lead caps, the woman spoke more sense than any of the news reports coming from the region since Hizbullah pulled its latest operation in an ongoing jihad putsch.

Her words should be posted at the head of every dispatch from Lebanon. Europeans, take heed. You thought their weapons would only be used against the Jews…Israel, that is. Ultimately they will be aimed at You!

In 2006, two days after Goldwasser and Regev were kidnapped in a cross-border attack from Lebanon then president Jacques Chirac delivered his traditional 14 Juillet (Independence Day) speech. Sharply rebuking Israel for a disproportionate response aimed at destroying Lebanon, he called for an immediate humanitarian cease fire.

French diplomacy was already at work at the UN. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy led Condoleeza Rice in a dance to the tune of Hizbullah, gradually inserting Nasrallah’s demands filtered through Siniora into the initial ceasefire resolution. They came up with Resolution 1701 that was supposed to be heartened by a beefed-up UNIFIL. Chirac promised to send 3000 troops, reduced to 800 as soon as the resolution was signed.

On the home front we were treated to an endless flow of primetime humanitarian crisis. French media visited frantic Franco-Lebanese families whose youngsters, vacationing in the homeland, were trapped in the wrath of Israel’s disproportionate response. Whole newscasts were shot on the docks as tearful refugees of varied nationalities—most of them hyphenated Lebanese—were evacuated. Microphones lapped up their indignation at Israel’s disproportionate response.

Today French media detect no humanitarian crisis. No refugees. The airport is closed, the port is closed, and no one seems to have the courage to open an escape route. Or even to admit what is happening. A ridiculous vocabulary imposed by Hizbullah is picked up and mindlessly repeated. It started with food riots. A few days later it was “civil disobedience.” And now it is “calm restored,” as the army moves in and holds the positions established by the putschistes.

Though the Sarkozy government is striving to break with three decades of twisted Mideast policy, no strong statements have yet been heard. FM Kouchner is still trying to figure out how to get humanitarian aid workers into Burma against the will of the junta and the refusal of the UN to take a stand. France is in easy living mode as the long Mayday weekend melded into the long Pentecost weekend. And no one has thought of soliciting a comment from Jacques Chirac, who is living in a luxury apartment that belongs to Saad Hariri. His generous benefactor--whose media have been torched, whose government is surrounded, whose soldiers are disloyal, who can be eliminated at will--might appreciate a kind word from his late father’s best friend.

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